Through the aisles of the forest he saw a strange, streaky, murky something moving, alive, shifting up and down, never an instant the same.  It must have been the wind—­the heat before the fire.  He seemed to see through it, but there was nothing beyond, only opaque, dim, mustering clouds.  Hot puffs shot forward into his face.  His eyes smarted and stung.  His ears hurt and were growing deaf.  The tumult was the rear of avalanches, of maelstroms, of rushing seas, of the wreck of the uplands and the ruin of the earth.  It grew to be so great a roar that he no longer heard.  There was only silence.

And he turned to face ahead.  The stallion stretched low on a dead run; the tips of the pines were bending before the wind; and Wildfire, the terrible thing for which his horse was named, was leaping through the forest.  But there was no sound.

Ahead of Slone, down the aisles, low under the trees spreading over the running King, floated swiftly some medium, like a transparent veil.  It was neither smoke nor air.  It carried faint pin points of light, sparks, that resembled atoms of dust floating in sunlight.  It was a wave of heat driven before the storm of fire.  Slone did not feel pain, but he seemed to be drying up, parching.  And Lucy must be suffering now.  He goaded the stallion, raking his flanks.  Wildfire answered with a scream and a greater speed.  All except Lucy and Sage King and Wildfire seemed so strange and unreal—­the swift rush between the pines, now growing ghostly in the dimming light, the sense of a pursuing, overpowering force, and yet absolute silence.

Slone fought the desire to look back.  But he could not resist it.  Some horrible fascination compelled him.  All behind had changed.  A hot wind, like a blast from a furnace, blew light, stinging particles into his face.  The fire was racing in the tree-tops, while below all was yet clear.  A lashing, leaping flame engulfed the canopy of pines.  It was white, seething, inconceivably swift, with a thousand flashing tongues.  It traveled ahead of smoke.  It was so thin he could see the branches through it, and the fiery clouds behind.  It swept onward, a sublime and an appalling spectacle.  Slone could not think of what it looked like.  It was fire, liberated, freed from the bowels of the earth, tremendous, devouring.  This, then, was the meaning of fire.  This, then, was the horrible fate to befall Lucy.

But no!  He thought he must be insane not to be overcome in spirit.  Yet he was not.  He would beat the flame to Lucy.  He felt the loss of something, some kind of a sensation which he ought to have had.  Still he rode that race to kill his sweetheart better than any race he had ever before ridden.  He kept his seat; he dodged the snags; he pulled the maddened horse the shortest way, he kept the King running straight.

No horse had ever run so magnificent a race!  Wildfire was outracing wind and fire, and he was overhauling the most noted racer of the uplands against a tremendous handicap.  But now he was no longer racing to kill the King; he was running in terror.  For miles he held that long, swift, wonderful stride without a break.  He was running to his death, whether or not he distanced the fire.  Nothing could stop him now but a bursting heart.